Thoughts on "Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov

When the Red Room web page invited Red Roomers to write about a lesser-known novel by a great writer this week, I first thought of Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov (the author of Lolita and Pale Fire, two constantly blinking buoys on those ever-roiling lists of greatest novels ever written).

But it’s been a few years since I experienced the hair-raising magic of Laughter, its whirls of whimsy and thrilling, heartbreaking turns.

It so happens that, a week ago, I closed the covers on another lesser-known Nabokov, his short and funny gem Pnin, a novel written after Lolita, but often overlooked in Nabokov discussions. It’s a novel that readers who may feel too intimidated—or disturbed—by other Nabokov classics, are much more likely to take into their hearts.

Timofey Pnin (pronounced p-neen) is an emigrant Russian scholar and lecturer at Waindell, a small university in New York state (modeled on Cornell University where Nabokov taught in the 1950s).

There’s no plot per se in Pnin, but a series of picaresque incidents. We meet Pnin as he’s traveling to deliver a lecture at a far off town and learn early on that he’s on the wrong train. Clearly, we have a man adrift, a homely and homeless exile. Nabokov describes him as:

 “Ideally bald . . . with that great brown dome of his, his tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck and strong man torso in a tightish tweed coat . . . ”

He almost sounds like a space alien. Or an odd, misshapen species captured in a distant jungle and then set loose to fend for himself.

But Pnin is very human and very much alone: his ex-wife dumped him on the boat over from Europe (as surely as if she’d thrown him overboard). He doesn’t understand his son; he comprehends the English language barely better than the strange inhospitable land he so wants to call his new home, America. On campus, he’s a figure of fun, an object of contempt, his intelligence and sensitivity obscured and ignored. Still, though he’s lost so much, he seems imbued with indomitable innocence and hope.

Pnin’s world is always crumpling like thin ice under his “frail-looking, almost feminine feet.” It’s like he’s seeing through two glasses darkly, with each glass set at a different angle, fracturing his vision and leading to a long chain of misunderstandings and near-calamities.

It’s not that Pnin gets off on the wrong foot wherever he goes. For him, there is no right foot to start from, not in America. It’s only when he returns to the Russia of his memories, or the one he finds in the stacks at the school library, and, in one beautiful episode, during a weekend he spends with some fellow Russian expats, that he finds comfort in his own skin. But these moments slip away, becoming like memories laid over memories. Soon Pnin is back to flailing in his alien adopted land, a place sometimes friendly and generous, sometimes mean and threatening.

Nabokov has been sometimes called a cold, unfeeling writer, but after five years or so of reading through his work, book-by-book, I cannot agree (though cruelties do lurk about, like snakes under a bright flowerbed.) For one, Bend Sinister, his version on the world portrayed in1984, may not be as artistically successful as Orwell’s book, but it nevertheless lifted tears in me more than once.

I find Pnin to be the most touching and kindly of his stories that I’ve read so far. Despite Pnin’s near-constant mishaps, some of his own making, Nabokov’s astounding lyricism captures Pnin’s experience and blossoms into a rare and amazing empathy.

It’s often a big mistake to impute autobiographical intent to a writer’s work—especially Nabokov’s. The author steers the reader away from seeing Pnin as a Nabokov self-portrait with the surprising emergence of a familiar character from Pnin’s Russian past, another exile, one who, instead being overwhelmed and consumed by this new land, has embraced it in his own way.

If there’s a “message” at the center of this bittersweet novel, it’s there but for the grace of God goes Nabokov.

As for the writing, it’s Nabokov prose as it always is--lovely. Delightful imagery and amusing insights alight in the mind’s eye like a butterfly. Pnin’s voice is described as “a slow, monotonous baritone that seemed to climb one of those interminable flights of stairs used by people who dread elevators.” At one point, he becomes enchanted by his landlady’s washing machine “. . . watching through that porthole what looked like an endless tumble of dolphins with the staggers.”  

This isn’t merely the joy of writing. This is the joy of seeing things in a unique way, the way Nabokov sees them.

While Pnin may not strike a major chord like Lolita and other Nabokov books, its bright, charming lyricism and tender regard for the hapless soul at its center, has a way of sticking with you.

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

You Never Give Me Your Money

 

[The following was in response to a Red Room Request for posts on the issue of Writing for Free].


Dear John, the Internet Reader:

We simply can’t go on like this.

I want to break up with you.

You’ve been reading me for years now. For far too long I have labored to send you Winnie-the-Pooh parodies, strangely popular fanboy tributes to movie villains, and essays about nature’s best places to take a soul-stirring walk.

I have made you cry. I have made you frown.  I may even have made you laugh (though for the wrong reasons and only when I am out of earshot.).

And what do you, John, the Internet Reader, give me in return? Oh, you may leave one or two comments on my webpage per week; you may “like” me on Facebook (or do you really only “pity” me? There’s an idea for ya: a “pity” button on Facebook); maybe you visit me five hundred times a week on all three of my main pages, including mostly the Red Room.

But do you ever give me your . . . MONEY!?

You never even give me your funny paper.

Ever since the late 1990s, when San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll—an actual writer who is PAID to write his daily column—suggested to a group of writers that we start an e-mail column to lift us from obscurity’s lonely pit, you have been reading my pearly prose without paying one copper PENNY for the privilege.

 Do you ever send MONEY? Nope, not a even rusty worn DIME. No MacArthur Grants, PEN Awards, not for a PLUG NICKEL. The most CURRENCY I have ever made was for writing squibs for the East Bay Express Best of the Bay 2010 issue.

You know what your casual neglect gets me? Half-hour vacations on the porcelain shores of Lake Burchfield, no thanks to you!

I know what you’re going to say: that I am an Artiste and must remain Pure and Starving in my Cramped Cold Garret, while my darling wife continues her ceaseless labor to bring home a PAYCHECK;

That just because Orson Welles once said he’d pull his pants down on Times Square to draw an audience does not mean I have to drop mine for the same Mercenary Values.

That it would be Wrong and Immoral to Sell Out to The Man, the same Man who PAYS MONEY to the writers of The New Yorker, The New York Times and Teen Beat (which mysteriously rejected my daring trenchant essay “Why Youth is Wasted on The Young.”)

But you, Dear John, the Internet Reader, you who live in Jack Benny Heaven, are Wrong.

As you continue to insist that everything must be free—or so cheap as to be worthless--I only have to point to Peter Straub, Thomas Pynchon and Vladimir Nabokov (who whiled away his later days chasing butterflies around a palatial Swiss hotel oh why oh why is it not me!?), to emphasize that Art and COMMERCE do occasionally meet and I am tired of sitting out in the waiting room scheming how to craft a query letter to Cosmopolitan (“Ten Hot Sex Positions to Try Out in Times Square!”).

And those free essays and articles I’ve been posting and e-mailing for so many years? Over the next year or so, I will be removing them from their various pages, collecting,  repackaging and then reloading them as actual e-books for which you will GIVE ME MONEY if you ever hope to read such sterling feullitons  as “Hiking Turlock” “Fun with Pliers,” and  “The Hotel Bars of Emeryville.” 

If you buy enough of my books online and off—say enough to pay for beer—I may vanish from the Internet altogether. You will have to PAY just to hear my heavy breathing over a Skype connection.

Oh, I may lose a few clicks from getgoodinsurance.com and numberoneweightlossblog.com, but think of the fine beer I will drink with the MONEY you will PAY me!

So this is a kind of good-bye, a farewell, a tear-stained handkerchief waved delicately in the air. 

No . . . no . . . don’t! I hurts me to see you cry! Don’t get mad!

Just break out your VISA, whip out your CHECKBOOK, or hop on down to the ATM. The free ride’s coming to an end, lover. It’s war now and I cannot let you depress the Marketplace—and by implication, the whole economy—anymore.

Love,

Your Favorite Online Writer

PS: I hope we can be friends.

Photos by author

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.
 

I Think About Stupid Things

Last week, the Red Room Web site held a blogging contest. The object was to answer the following question: “What are your obsessions? Your passions? Your fixations?”

My first, impulsive answer was “You don’t want to know.” Number Two: “Ask my wife.”

And then there’s that old favorite: “None of your damn business.”

I oscillate between resistance to answer the question and the sweet impish desire to tell flattering—but flat-out—lies: “Ohhhh, I obsess all day about the Founders and how their legacy has at last borne fruit with Presidency of Barack Obama, while I nobly fix my gaze upon the distant horizon.”

Truth-telling is a deadly business so I’m better off joking about checking off all the movies I’ve seen in Leonard Maltin’s guide; wondering why movie villain Lee Van Cleef was never cast as a vampire (he would’ve been great); or finessing my Niles Crane impersonation.

As a man suffering from ALS once told an interviewer digging for great pearls of wisdom from a dying man: “I think about stupid things.”

The Red Room invitation was inspired by a comment author Joyce Maynard made about obsession and writing. I’ve not read Maynard’s work but I understand she’s written some classic memoirs, including one about her time with Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger. I guess you would categorize her work as “memoir’ or “confessional literature.”

Not one that applies to me.

I deliberately cast myself a genre writer. One thing that sets genre writers (or, maybe, “writers of action fiction”) apart from mainstream literary writers is a seeming rejection of personal revelation. For example, while you learn a whole lot of about spy work and spy life from John LeCarré’s spy fiction, you learn little about LeCarré’s actual life when he worked for British intelligence (though he wrote a brilliant true-life portrait of his con man father in The New Yorker some years back).

I attempted confessional pieces when I was quite young and, frankly, regret every word. Revealing (and obsessing over) the intimate treasures buried in my psychic sock drawer is so much less appealing to me at fifty-four than it was at twenty-four when I had the peculiar idea I’d somehow alchemize tragedian Eugene O’Neill with farceur Joe Orton and conjure something brilliant. (Yes, you're right. It was a bad idea.)

I do obliquely use my life and very infrequently my private obsessions in my tales, but not to “share myself.” Embarrassment aside, once I’ve shown my secret obsessive self to a reader, what are they supposed to do with it? Whether they actually see me in a protagonist or not doesn’t matter.

What matters is how lost you get in the world I’ve created and the adventures that take place in it. My life is the spackled cement. You should hardly see it.

Back to obsession and writing. I don’t see that writing a book is as an obsessive act, unless you suffer from graphomania; in that case, the writer might never finish, only vanish behind slowly rising white towers of unread paper.

In life, it seems, though obsessives very often occupy books, they seldom write them, or at least successfully completed ones. An obsessive can, say, build a bridge, but he must delegate the overwhelming multitude of complex tasks to others to focus his obsessive laser-like vision--building that bridge as he envisions it in his mind. Here, obsession can actually work to the good.

A novel writer, though he needs some outside help, writes his books alone. Fiction and nonfiction alike, book are large complex projects, riddled with uncertainties and requiring a thought-out, nuanced, rather wide-minded approach. Passion (or “flow” as I sometimes think of it) surely plays a prime, but intermittent, role. But even a story aflame with passion on every page is simultaneously the product of a cool, detached and unobsessed eye. The writer has to consider and weave together a
multitude of details; he doesn’t need a laser vision so much as eyes and ears wrapped around his skull like jeweled headbands, seeing and hearing from all directions; and a fine filter to synthesize everything he absorbs.

At his most concentrated (and psychotic), the obsessive is tyrannized by one single thought, to the brute exclusion of all else, even—and especially—his own well being. He’s a closed-off beam of light, shooting through the blackness all around. His obsession imprisons him. He’s unable to stand outside his hot thin wire to see and work with the shape of it, the nuance and the context of the events he’s burning through; he might be likened to an extreme singularity or a kind of black hole.

The difference between an obsessive like Jack Torrance, the protagonist in The Shining and author Stephen King is the difference between “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” typed out countless times and Stephen King’s finished rounded masterpiece.

Sometimes I see the word “obsessive” used by critics to describe the relationship of an artist to his themes or techniques, but this seems an exaggeration. If Thomas Pynchon was as “obsessed” by paranoia as critics claim, he couldn’t leave his apartment (which he does quite often, or so I’ve read), much less write a book. If Alfred Hitchcock was as “obsessed” in his films with blondes as is said, he’d be a mere crazed girly photographer like Irving Klaw (though Hitch did suffer from
episodes of obsession in his life, as blond Tippi Hedren well knew; obsession did both her and Hitchcock’s art little good).

As I finish this, I’m certainly “focused.” I’m also “concentrated,” “fascinated”, “concerned with” and even “intensely thoughtful.”

But every day, I reach a point where I'm outside of myself and see that I'm no longer Master of the Universe I'm trying to put up on the screen. The words, the scenes, start to stumble and slow, my thoughts turn to slow-pouring mud, while my stomach growls and I realize I’m thirsty for a beer or some top shelf scotch. I have several other pieces to write and my wife calls from downstairs: Time to go watch Frasier.

(Photo of author's eye by author)